This is a story about proving, with data, that No Diggity by Blackstreet is timeless.

Until recently, it was impossible to measure the popularity of older music. Billboard charts and album sales only tell us about a song’s popularity at the time of its release.

But now we have Spotify, a buffet of all of music, new and old. Tracks with fewer plays are fading into obscurity. And those with more plays are remaining in the cultural ether.

20 years have passed since No Diggity's release. Its popularity on Spotify, relative to every other song from the 90s, is a strong signal for whether it will be remembered by our children’s children. So let's examine every song that ever charted, 1990 - 1999, and rank them by number of plays on Spotify, today.

What's Remembered from the 90s

most-played hits* on Spotify (1990 - 1999)

Spotify Playcounts in 2014

FIND A TRACK :

MOST POPULAR 90S SONG ON SPOTIFY IN 2014

NO DIGGITY!

SPOTIFY PLAYCOUNTS

14,000,000

20,000,000

26,000,000

38,000,000

44,000,000

50,000,000

Oasis, Wonderwall

34,342,877 plays

1996

*Songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 (via the Whitburn project). Some artists (notably, The Beatles, Taylor Swift) are not on Spotify.

Note on Methodology: The data is skewed, since playcounts include people of all ages. Technically, we should normalize the data with Spotify users only born after 1995. They're the incoming generation with little bias towards the music (they didn't grow up with it), and they'll influence whomever is around in 2050. Spotify's user base already skews young, and the data more-or-less represents a generation in their mid-20s.

Out of the entire catalog of music from the 90s, these are the tracks on the trajectory to survive. Some of my friends were deeply disturbed by what's been lost in time (e.g., Pearl Jam). And No Diggity isn’t just anecdotally timeless, it’s the fifth most-played song from the 90s.

Note the tracks that hardly charted on Billboard, in their day. Smells Like Teen Spirit, a track that never reached the Billboard Top 5 when it was released in 1992, is now the most-played song from the 90s.

Using Spotify plays, we can also see which rappers are still remembered from the early days of hip hop (e.g., Biggie vs. Tupac).

*Songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 (via the Whitburn project).

Biggie has three of the Top 10 hip-hop songs between 1986 and 1999. This is a strong signal that future generations will remember Biggie as the referent artist of 80s and 90s hip-hop. And there's No Diggity as the top – perhaps it's that glorious Dr. Dre verse.

Hip hop heads will lament the omission of Rakim, Public Enemy, or Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. It’s a depressing reality that exists for every genre and generation: not every artist will be remembered. The incoming generation will control what’s relevant from the 90s and carried into the future, independant of quality and commercial success. For rock, that might be Blink-182. For electronica, that might be Sandstorm.

Past popularity doesn’t always translate into present-day popularity. Here's how that manifests across all genres and decades.

*Songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 (via the Whitburn project). Some artists (notably, The Beatles, Taylor Swift) are not in Spotify.

TRACK

SPOTIFY PLAYCOUNTS

For the entire 1980s, Don’t Stop Believin’ is the most-played song on Spotify. This song barely charted on Billboard. From the 70’s: Bohemian Rhapsody. If we were to time travel to either decade, no one would reasonably believe that these two songs would be cultural touchstones for their respective decades in 2015.

Over time, our biggest stars will fade, and sometimes surprising acts emerge.

Let's examine this pattern to better understand the present-day popularity of historic superstars.

Here are the top-5 tracks from the 90s, along with Billboard performance in the year of each song's release date.

Billboard Performance for the Top 5 Most-played 90s Hits

TRACK

SPOTIFY PLAYCOUNTS

PEAK BILLBOARD POSITION

BILLBOARD YEARLY RANK*

1.

Smells Like Teen Spirit — Nirvana, 1991

50,657,282

#6 OF 100

#42 OF 385, 1991

2.

Iris — Goo Goo Dolls, 1998

35,669,952

#9

#57 OF 346, 1998

3.

Wonderwall — Oasis, 1996

34,352,877

#2

#45 OF 314, 1996

4.

Under The Bridge — Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1992

33,625,240

#2

#20 OF 370, 1992

5.

No Diggity — BLACKstreet, 1996

30,911,317

#1

#5 OF 314, 1996

*Highest Position on Billboard Hot 100/Number of Weeks at highest/Number of weeks in Top 10, Top 40, Top 100.

There were 41 more popular songs in 1991 than Smells Like Teen Spirit: End Of The Road (Boyz II Men), Baby Got Back (Sir Mix Alot), Save The Best For Last (Vanessa Williams), and I'm Too Sexy (Right Said Fred).

Since 1992, these songs have slowly faded from culture with the incoming generation, whereas Nirvana’s music has not only maintained its popularity, but augmented it.

Here's that same data for the past 6 decades: take a look at the Billboard #1s and where they stand today.

Larger circle indicates track's billboard performance at time of release

Eminem, Lose Yourself

Billboard yearly rank:

#1 of 295, 2002

LOWER BILLBOARD RANK, BUT HIGH ON SPOTIFY

BEST CHART PERFORMANCE IN '91, BUT NOT AS POPULAR TODAY ON SPOTIFY

For example, in 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is?

Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68.

Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer. When we examine pop hits, popularity is so much more than song quality.

But future generations don’t remember Bobby Lewis’s dancing and good looks. Spotify only catalogues his music. And unfortunately, that quality didn’t endure in the same way as At Last. (And of course, we have not even considered the role of covers, samples, and movie soundtracks, etc. – a future project to undertake).

And for this reason, it will be weird to hear future generations reverently listen to groups such as Nickelback – the kids only know their music, not what they culturally stood for in 2015.

Yet, we don’t know what happened in-between: a song’s trajectory from peak popularity until today. If we had such data points, we’d be able to understand how major cultural events or changes in taste influenced the trajectory of a song.

With Spotify, we have so much more detail: daily playcounts. We can understand a track's decay rate from its peak popularity: whether it’s quickly fading from culture or holding steady to be played by future generations.

Let’s look at the trajectory of the most popular tracks from 2013 and how they're faring today, in 2015.

The Long-term Future of Hits from 2013

Growth, Decay-Rate of 2013-released Tracks on Spotify

Tracks were officially released in 2013.

FIND A TRACK :

higher playcount plateau,future timelessness

NOT A HUGE SUCCESS, BUT STEADY GROWTH

SPOTIFY PLAYCOUNTS

(INDEXED)

If we were to review “Best of 2013” lists, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines would be the cultural touchstones. Get Lucky won the Grammy for Record of the Year and Blurred Lines was nominated.

If my children's children were to ask what we listened to in 2013, I'd pick either of Pharrell’s collaborations or someone like Calvin Harris.

But that was two years ago, and we expect popularity to fade. Today, one track in particular has the most interesting trajectory: OneRepublic’s Counting Stars. Counting Stars never had breakout success following its release, yet it has managed to stay in the cultural zeitgeist for more than a year after its peak popularity.

One hypothesis: Counting Stars had a chance to spread organically via word-of-mouth since its April 2013 release, cascading from indie music circles to casual listeners. Get Lucky, on the other hand, dominated music channels in its heyday. Most people likely heard the track via mass media rather than friends.

When a track experiences such a rapid ascent, it’s a deal with the devil: the song achieves commercial success, but it also saturated culture in such a way that there’s immense listening fatigue among fans and fad-like connotations.

Lana Del Ray’s Young and Beautiful and Arctic Monkey’s Do I Wanna Know look like modern equivalents of At Last: little commercial success on its release, but steady growth over time. Today in 2015, both tracks are at parity with Royals and Get Lucky, and you’d probably never guess it.

What's still popular from different periods in history is almost never the obvious choice. Accolades, Grammys, and cultural dominance mean nothing to future generations.

The artists who have cult-followings and underground appeal: it’s a signal for some undefined musical quality that’s impossible for a hit song to replicate. Perhaps it means that they are culturally ahead of their time. Or perhaps generations will feel obligated to share it, for fear of it fading.

Polygraph is a publication for thoughtful, data-driven storytelling. We depict with data, even over describing with prose. If you’re a designer, developer, data-scientist, or journalist who would like to collaborate, reach out: matthew.f.daniels@gmail.com or @matthew_daniels.